UPDATE, June 28: As of June 26, the Greater Sydney region including the Central Coast, the Blue Mountains and Wollongong is under a compulsory two-week lockdown until 11.59pm on July 9. Many events in Sydney have therefore been cancelled or postponed until after this period.
A new exhibition of UNSW Galleries celebrates the work of UK-based Australian artist and filmmaker Sam Smith, surveying of a decade of exciting video installation, sculpture and live performance. Capture, running from May 7 to July 31, features both the equipment behind the art and the digital distribution of his work. Exploring montage, shifting narratives and the camera itself, it includes experimental video and documentary works that marry scientific data with the 'what if?' of speculative fictions, getting to the nub of how the moving image can manipulate our sense of time and space and draw us into imagined realms.
Curated by José Da Silva, the exhibition also includes a new installation, ‘Capture 2021’ based on Smith’s acclaimed live video essay ‘performances Notes 2013–ongoing’. Elaborately staged at the centre of the exhibition, the two-screen video work begins with the on-screen dissection of a Blackmagic cinema camera and then breaks down each individual component to discover the minerals found within the device. In total, 74 chemical elements are unearthed from within the camera, representing 63 per cent of the entire periodic table. So science, photography and movie dorks are gonna get a real kick out of it. We also love the bold geometric grids and Tron-like colours of 'Slow Fragmentation'.
Smith's most ambitious work to date, Capture has been created alongside a team of Australia’s leading researchers specialising in solid-state and elemental analysis at the UNSW Mark Wainwright Analytical Centre.
